An exploration of what performance can do to expand conventional representations of becoming a mother. Maternal bodies and processes of pregnancy, childbirth and sustenance have historically been depicted in art and literature as variously uncanny, abject, grotesque, monstrous, and hybrid.



Societal conventions and myths around what makes a good or bad mother have limited the representations of maternal ambivalence and labour. Lived experiences of matrescence as depicted by mothers themselves have remained almost invisible with little exposure in galleries or mainstream art and media. Challenging complex and disparaging representations, or the erasure and invisibility of experiences of matrescence altogether, contemporary mother/artists working in the field of performance use their live bodies to subvert dominant images of conventional myths of motherhood.



Using strategies of mimesis, liveness, embodiment, relationality, and performativity to render their own matrescent bodies, these artists explore historically pejorative theoretical concepts and aesthetics in new, feminist ways. This book frames performance as a site where becoming a mother can be understood as both a becoming and an unbecoming to expand understandings of matrescence.

Provides new perspectives on the increasingly complex relationships between media forms and formats, materiality, and meaning. Drawing on a range of qualitative methodologies, our consideration of the materiality of media is structured around three overarching concepts: form – the physical qualities of objects and the meanings which extend from them; format – objects considered in relation to the protocols which govern their use, and the meanings and practices which stem from them; and ephemeral meaning – the ways in which media artefacts are captured, transformed, and redefined through changing social, cultural, and technological values.

Each section includes empirical chapters which provide expansive discussions of perspectives on media and materiality. It considers a range of media artefacts such as 8mm film, board games maps, videogames, cassette tapes, transistor radios and Twitter, amongst others. These are punctuated with a number of short takes – less formal, often personal takes exploring the meanings of media in context.



We seek to consider the materialities which emerge across the broad and variegated range of the term’s use, and to create spaces for conversation and debate about the implications that this plurality of material meanings might have for the study of study of media, culture, and society.

This book introduces the concept of activist music research, emphasising action and social responsibility and suggests that music research can be used to promote social and ecological justice. This is discussed in a series of position papers by music researchers who engage in public debate in their various roles - educator, critic, journalist, DJ, producer, promoter - and work with other actors in civil society and culture. 



The book suggests that we are experiencing an activist turn in music research, evidenced by the growing number of projects and publications discussing inequalities in musical practices and the impact music research can have on these inequalities. This idea is explored in a series of position papers and contemplative texts, where music researchers, music educators, and artistic researchers reflect on how their work and the position they occupy as professionals in society serves eco-social justice and equity. What is the point of studying and teaching music in an age of ecocide, neo(liberal)-colonialism, rampant racial inequities, persistent gender identity and sexual orientation discrimination? What does social and ecological responsibility and sustainability mean in music research?

The idea for the book was conceived within the context of Suoni, a non-profit independent research association in Finland founded as a self-organizing and independent network for scholars interested in exploring methods, pedagogics, practices and action for eco-social equity in relation to music and music research. 

El Vez performances present a powerful message of social justice and inclusion in changing US and social contexts. Make the Dream Real interrogates how this message is activated through world-building: the use of a variety of theoretical, theatrical, and musical tactics that bring into being a progressive social space that refutes the current economic, political, social, and cultural configurations of the United States.



World-building in an El Vez show “makes the dream real” by imagining a society in which equal rights are guaranteed, inclusivity is fostered, difference is valued, and the violence of economic inequality is mitigated. But, world-building through performance is not content to reside exclusively in the individual imagination or the social imaginary; it temporarily creates this new social space in actual time and space for the audience to experience. Using a dramaturgical methodology, which marries theoretical inquiry to theatrical practice based on dramaturgical thinking, critical proximity, and intellectual flexibility, the book delves into the theoretical foundations that inform artist Robert Lopez’s work, and each chapter analyzes a different performative component he uses.



Make the Dream Real interrogates how El Vez’s playful engagements hold the United States to its egalitarian promises, voicing and enacting - however fleetingly - a just and richly inclusive social space through performance.

Based on over a decade of collective teaching, this volume explores the hybrid use of online and in-person collaboration as a means of offering international experience to university-level arts students. Chapters articulate a collective learning based on the experiences of the International Art Collaborations Network (INTAC), Collective Body group and related programs which the authors and contributors have participated in as educators and students.

Illustrated with photographs, screenshots and student projects, the book inspires reflection on teaching methodologies and student artmaking strategies across cultures and languages. Pedagogical and methodological topics trace an evolution of curricular approaches and use of evolving online platforms. Examples of themes and visual strategies demonstrate the power of student-directed collaborative learning. Diverse voices have been gathered through research conducted with educators and alumni connected to INTAC, providing perspectives on working collaboratively in a global context.

Student projects exemplify responses to the challenges of communication and creation that come with distanced artistic partnership. Chapters end with suggested points for conversation, whether between educators, students of art education or students entering collaborations. Although based on experiences in the visual arts, the ideas and methods are applicable to others engaging in inter-institutional education or online collaborative practices.

Fully illustrated with examples of collaborative art projects, photographs, screenshots, diagrams and posters.

This collection seeks to explore alternative definitions of bounded identities, facilitating new approaches to spatial and architectural forms. Taking as its starting point the emergence of a new sense of ‘boundary’ emerged from the post-19th century dissolution of large, heterogeneous empires into a mosaic of nation-states in the Islamic world. This new sense of boundaries has not only determined the ways in which we imagine and construct the idea of modern citizenship, but also redefines relationships between the nation, citizenship, cities and architecture.

It brings critical perspectives to our understanding of the interrelation between the accumulated flows and the evolving concepts of boundary in predominantly Muslim societies and within the global Muslim diaspora. Essays in this book seeks to investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness that have been devised to define, enable, obstruct, accumulate and/or control flows able to disrupt bounded territories or identities.

More generally, the book explores how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implication of defining modern self. The essays in this volume collectively address how the construction of self is primarily a spatial event and operated within the crucial nexus of power-knowledge-space.



Contributors investigate how architecture mediates the creation and deployment of boundaries and boundedness, how architecture might be considered as a means to understand the relationship between flows and boundaries and its implications for how we define the modern self.

Part of the Critical Studies in Architecture of the Middle East series. 

In a world facing multiple existential crises, music might be seen as little more than a distraction. However, in this synthesis of ideas developed over a decade, a timely re-appraisal of the potential of musicing for human flourishing is presented, emphasising its role in the history of human evolution alongside its potential as a resource for sustainable development. 



A holistic philosophy of music is outlined which recognises the complex web of meaning which spreads across complementary musical dimensions of performance and participation, whilst emphasising the ‘paramusical’ benefits which arise from both. Highlighting the notion that the social bonds which arise from musicing share much of the neurobiological underpinnings of attachment and love, musicing is presented as a resource with the potential for facilitating ethical human connection.



The humanistic values which are thereby materialised during musicing – love, reciprocity and justice – form the experiential grounds for inhabiting alternative social realities. The book addresses how such a holistic philosophy of music might be implemented in practice, drawing on the author’s professional praxis as a performer, educator, community musician, composer and researcher, in particular their experience of musician education at Sage Gateshead, Royal College of Music and Trinity-Laban Conservatoire in the UK.

Medical knowledge manifests in materials, and materials are integral to the reproduction of medical knowledge. From the novice student to the expert practitioner, those who study and work in and around medicine rely on material guidance in their everyday practice and as they seek to further their craft.

Students, just as experts, pore over textbooks, photographs and films. They put up and copy down chalkboard illustrations, manipulate plastic models and inspect organic specimens fixed in formalin. They pass through grand university libraries and try not to contaminate anything in cramped surgical theatres. Students, just as experts, learn within an expansive material culture of medicine, they learn from explicitly educative materials, from the workaday tools used for diagnosis and in treatment, they learn in everyday spaces and as part of sprawling infrastructures. While the specific constellation of material varies across time and space, many materials have remained constant, key actors in the spread of medical practices and in the steady, global expansion of biomedical frameworks of health and disease. This collection focuses on the materials, objects, tools and technologies which facilitate the reproduction of medical knowledge and often reify understandings of medical science.

The training of doctors is changing rapidly in response to technological development as well to the evolving needs and expectations of patients. Medical schools are beginning to respond to these challenges through curricula redesign and the purchase or endorsement of new teaching aids, simulations and pedagogies. Often, this means that medical schools are embracing the digital at the expense of older teaching materials. Medical education is at a critical juncture and there is momentum to radically rethink its approaches.

This collection offers a reflection on these challenges by presenting an innovative and expansive overview of the role of materiality in the training of doctors and in the social reproduction of medicine in general. Experimental in form, and with ethnographic, museological and historical cases, and traces from around the world, this edited volume is the first to fully explore the matter of medical education in the modern world. Supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

An academic text, it will be most relevant to academics and graduate students in the fields of health and material culture, but will also have a wider readership with those working on medical education and knowledge and medical history

Nobuo Uematsu is one of the most influential Japanese composers of the current age. One of Japan’s most beloved living composers, he has been composing music for the popular franchise since 1987, inspiring a new generation of classical music fans, and named by Time Magazine as an ‘innovator’ of the new wave of music.

Sometimes described as the Beethoven of video game music, Nobuo Uematsu has built his career and reputation from his soundtracks to the enduring Final Fantasy series of video games, which are notable for their remarkable cinematic feel.

Classic FM radio describes Nobuo as ‘part John Williams, part Wagnerian leitmotif, part new-age soundscaper – and a legend in his own right’. He has so far appeared five times in the top 20 of the annual Classic FM Hall of Fame, voted for by listeners.

This is the first book-length study on the music of Uematsu. It takes a variety of different analytical approaches to his music. It offers readers interested in ludomusicology (the study of and research into video game music) a variety of ways in which to understand Uematsu’s compositional process and the role that video game music has in the overall gaming experience.

Those interested in Uematsu’s music will gain a greater appreciation and understanding of his compositional processes and his interaction with musical narrative, and those interested in ludomusicology in general will be shown various methodologies that can be applied to a single composer. Those interested in composing for video games or movies will also be given insight into how they might compose for a narrative themselves.

Professional musicians will gain deeper insight into the music from selected games in the series, as each chapter applies traditional theoretical and musicological methodologies to selected games from the series. It my also be a useful educational resource for use in their own studies by student and amateur musicians.

Foreword by William Gibbons, associate professor of musicology at Texas Christian University. Editor Richard Anatone is a professor of music theory at Prince George's Community College in Largo, Maryland.

It will be a valuable resource for ludomusicologists, as well as academics from a variety of disciplines who work in popular music and culture, film and visual media, and subjects traditionally marginalized by the Western 'Classical' canon. It will also be of interest to fans of the Final Fantasy series, both inside and outside of academia and to composers of video game music.

It will also appeal to readers interested in the business and marketing side of the video game industry, and who want to learn from the successes of live video game concerts and how symbolism and thematic interplay aids in drawing gamers’ attention to soundtracks and concerts of video game music.

Game developers will learn how to recognize potential composers and compositional approaches that will aid in storytelling, fandom and gamer immersion.

General video game historians who want to learn more about Square’s early years and eventual transition into a powerhouse development company will also find much to interest them.

While there have been several edited collections in the subdiscipline of ludomusicology, this is the first book to address a composer’s oeuvre as the main subject. It brings together a variety of methodologies and voices on the subject, and has potential to become a model for future composer-focused studies.

This original new book has a unique focus on diva camp as popular music praxis. The author analyses case studies of diva concert tour shows in order to present a performance studies reading of camp, the culture-sharing process of production, and audience reception. Detailed case studies include contemporary stars Madonna, Kylie, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga and a look at audience drag.

The book contains detailed descriptions of artists’ performances, along with the analysis of exciting and popular contemporary performers. The emphasis on camp is particularly interesting, as thinking about queerness has pushed camp into the background in recent years. This is an interesting and exciting revival of the question of camp in contemporary queer performance.

The book considers and investigates the relationship between camp theory as an academic subject and the figure of the diva as one that utilizes and expresses camp in various ways. It seeks to establish how camp is appropriated or owned by the diva and how this impacts on, and is in turn appropriated and owned by, the audience.

Primary readership will be among researchers and educators working in the fields of cultural studies, performance studies, theatre studies, music studies, LGBTQ+ studies, critical race studies, as well as undergraduate students interested in these topics. It will be a useful classroom resource and addition to recommended reading lists.

The Music Diva Spectacle may have interest for more general readers with an interest in the subjects of the case studies, but the main focus is on the academic market.